Bride of a Bygone War (9 page)

“Would you like me to help you in the kitchen?” Prosser offered.

“No, no, no, the coffee is all prepared. Please, relax.”

César disappeared into the hallway and returned promptly with a well-worn silver-plated tray and two demitasse cups filled to the brim with thick, cloyingly sweet Arab coffee. He placed the cups on the edge of the table in front of them and pushed the tray to the side. “Let me start by asking you a question, Charles. Has Edouard ever talked to you about how he and I began our work together?”

“I seem to recall that you and Ed met in our embassy’s consular section during the Events, when Ed was a visa officer. Is that correct, or do I have things mixed up?” Prosser recalled that “Edouard” had been the alias Pirelli used with César.

César ignored Prosser’s question and posed another of his own. “And do you know the reason why I visited your consulate?”

“For a visa, I would expect. Why else would anyone who isn’t an American citizen bother to stand in those outrageous queues for the privilege of talking to rude people hiding behind bulletproof windows?”

César disregarded Prosser’s attempt at humor and looked to the floor with a sadness that Prosser had never seen before in the usually jovial Lebanese. “How I wish the matter were as simple. I went to your consulate because I needed help in finding a missing person: Muna’s husband. You see, Muna married an American.”

Prosser took his cup from the table and sipped the steaming black liquid with his full attention on César.
 

The agent’s eyes glistened and his hand appeared to tremble as he reunited cup and saucer. “Next month will be five years since William has been missing, yet we know scarcely more now about what became of him than on the day he left. On that afternoon, William was booked to depart on the Alitalia flight to Rome to attend some sort of meeting with his company. He and Muna had just returned from their honeymoon in Corfu the day before. And on the evening of their return, we all went to dinner together to celebrate—my wife; my sister, Claudette; her husband, Victor...”

“The sister who taught Arabic at the American embassy?”

César nodded. “Yes, though she and Victor live in Kuwait now. They left early in the war—even then Victor could see what was happening...” For a long moment César stared abstractedly out the window at the clouds’ violet underbellies, as if recollecting the events. “Please, excuse me,” he said, coming back to the present. “My mind wanders. I meant to tell you about Muna’s husband, not my sister, Claudette. In any event, hours passed after William left for the airport, and still we did not hear whether he had caught his flight. The checkpoints were already very dangerous in those days, particularly in the southern suburbs and around the airport.

“We called the police to see if he had been detained at a checkpoint en route to the West Side. No, they said, no Americans were on their list. Then we thought perhaps the telephone lines to the airport had been cut and his calls to us had not gone through, so we contacted the telephone company. The lines to the West Side were intact. We called Alitalia to verify that the flight to Rome had departed. It had. We waited longer, by now sick with worry—all of us, but Muna most of all.

“And then we turned on the radio and learned that Phalangist gunmen had massacred a busload of Palestinians in Aïn el Rummaneh earlier that afternoon. When we heard about the bus and the wave of revenge killings spreading across the city, our fears increased that William might have been captured at a roadblock before reaching the airport. We telephoned everyone again—the Lebanese Sûreté, the NLP and Phalange offices, even friends with ties to the Palestinians and the National Movement—but no one was aware of an American taken hostage that day. We called Alitalia once more to verify that William was aboard their flight. His name was on the manifest, they told us, but he never boarded the aircraft. We tried every other airline that had a scheduled flight departing that afternoon after. But his name did not appear on any manifest.”

Prosser nodded gravely. “That must have been a terrible time for you and your family,” he said. But César continued without acknowledging the comment.
 

“After two days and two nights spent at the telephone, I decided I must cross to West Beirut and make my inquiries in person. If any American had been captured or killed since the fighting began, the American consul would surely know. So the American embassy was my first stop.” The agent gave a dark laugh. “Of course, I was still very naïve in those days.

“In the beginning I had difficulty in finding anyone at the consulate to listen to me, as every counter was flooded with people seeking visas to America. At last one of the American secretaries lost patience with the crowd. She stood on a chair and made an earsplitting sound with a police whistle, then she demanded in a loud voice which of us did not want a visa. I was the only one to raise my hand. She led me into a vacant office, listened politely to my request, and then directed me to a door at the end of the corridor. It was the door to Edouard’s office.

“To be sure, I was so relieved at having found someone who was willing to listen to me, I think I would have done anything he asked. He told me to sit on the sofa and to tell him my entire story from the beginning. I told him how we had met a young American through my sister, Claudette, who gave him Arabic lessons in her home every day, and how she invited him one Sunday to join us for a family dinner at our mother’s house in the mountains.”

“Just a moment, César,” Prosser interrupted. “Was Muna’s husband doing anything else in Beirut besides learning Arabic? It seems rather odd to me that he would have come all the way to a city on the brink of civil war just to take language lessons. If you can give me his full name, I’ll check it against our consular records and ask Washington to run a name trace on him.”

“The name on his passport was William Conklin, but we all called him Bill in those days. When we first met, he said that he was a salesman for a company in New York—or was it New Jersey?—and that the company made refrigerators and freezers for hotels and restaurants. He told me the company’s name once, but I no longer remember it. He said they had a very profitable line of commercial refrigerators that they planned to market to hotels and restaurants and hospitals in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. Since William had experience selling the products and enjoyed traveling, he had volunteered to make sales calls in Jeddah and Riyadh. Within a month, he had received large purchase orders from two of the new hotels being built in Riyadh.

“When he returned to New York, he convinced his superiors that he could sell many more units in the Middle East if he could travel regularly to the cities where new hotels and other large institutions were being built. For this, however, he said he would need to study the Arabic language and learn something about how Arabs do business. His company agreed, and it was decided soon afterward that he should move to Beirut.

“That an American company would be willing to accept a delay of nearly a year to prepare one of its salesmen to do business properly with the Arabs did not seem odd to me at the time. I knew several Japanese who learned Arabic under similar circumstances. Nor did it seem odd that William made no attempts to sell equipment while he was in Lebanon. He would spend four or five hours a day in class with Claudette, then another five or six studying at home, all in addition to the tasks of daily living and his going out at night and over the weekends to relax with Muna and their friends. There was no time for selling his refrigerators.

“At the end of February, William told us that his company had decided that Beirut would not be suitable as a base for traveling to the Gulf and that he was to move to Kuwait by the beginning of April. This seemed to upset him, as by then he and Muna had begun to talk of marriage and they both wanted more time before making a final decision. William sent many letters and cables to New York in an effort to persuade his superiors to reverse their decision or at least to delay it until summer. But in the end the only concession they made was to have him return to New York for one week before traveling on to Kuwait in mid-April.

“As you might imagine, Muna was extremely upset over the idea that William might move to Kuwait so suddenly. She is a very persistent girl, and I think she made life very difficult for him then. One night soon afterward, I was at home reading when they returned after midnight from dinner at the Casino du Liban, laughing and singing like drunken sailors. I noticed at once the diamond ring on Muna’s hand.

“Believe me, Charles, when William asked permission to marry my only daughter, I had not the slightest reason to doubt he would treat her well. If someone had told me then that he would leave her a week after their wedding night and never return, I would have thought such a thing less likely than the sun coming up in the west. Even today, in my heart of hearts, I feel certain that William must have been captured and killed before he reached the airport. Because if he were alive, I know he would have found a way to return to her. As much as I reject the idea of his death, to think that he deserted my Muna—his wife of only one week—without so much as a word of explanation, is simply inconceivable. Yet, from time to time I see him in my dreams, lying on the beach in California or Brazil or Australia, or drinking champagne in a nightclub, surrounded by beautiful women. In each dream, he appears pleased to see me and invites me to sit with him and have a drink. But when he speaks my name, I cannot resist lunging for his throat and squeezing with all my strength, then watching his complexion turn from bronze to red to blue and then to black before I wake up.”

César took the last sip of his coffee but continued to hold the cup and saucer in his lap and stared blankly at the muddy grounds covering the bottom of the cup. “It seems odd to me now as I think of it, but Muna was never quite as upset as I expected her to be over William’s disappearance. The first day was hardest for her, of course. Once it became clear that no group had taken responsibility for having captured an American, Muna took heart and convinced herself that he was safely out of Lebanon and that she would hear from him soon. Days passed, then weeks and months, now years, but Muna still has maintained an unshakable faith that William will someday come back to Beirut. She will not tolerate a harsh word to be said about him, and has refused even to discuss an annulment of the marriage—that is, until this week.”

Prosser set down his cup and looked up at César with fresh interest.

“You see, another young man has declared his intention to marry Muna, and she realizes that before long she must decide whether to go on waiting for a man who may never return or to open her heart to someone very close by who cares deeply for her. Until now I have not told you about Elie—that is the young man’s name—because I did not want our business together to interfere with my daughter’s future. But now the time has come for it, and for showing my trust in you and in Edouard.

“You recall the series of reports I have sent you lately about Phalange intelligence and its operations against the Syrians?” César continued.

“The ones from Jubran’s cousin?” Prosser asked.

“Jubran has no cousin in Phalange intelligence,” César replied. “Those reports are from Elie. Whenever he joins us for dinner, we drink arak and discuss our progress in the struggle to expel the Syrian occupiers from Lebanon. Although I have never been a Phalangist, Elie respects my service with the Lebanese Forces during the Events and considers me as much a Lebanese patriot as he is. Whenever he visits, he always says more about his work than he intends. But that is hardly surprising, as we have known each other since he was a small boy growing up in the same village.”

“And the expenses that were paid to Jubran as reimbursement for entertaining his cousin?”

“I expended them for entertaining Elie, just as Jubran would have done for his cousin. All are accounted for.”

“All right, all right,” Prosser conceded. “I won’t question the expenses. Just tell me Elie’s full name and date and place of birth so that I can have them for our records.”

“I will tell you that in due time. It will suffice for the present that Elie is a middle-ranking officer in Phalange intelligence and participates directly in their operations against the Syrians and Palestinians. He has direct access to the information he gives me.”

“When do you plan to tell me the rest?”

“As soon as I know that he will become my son-in-law,” César offered. “But even if he does not marry Muna, it may still be possible for me to continue meeting Elie as a friend and to recruit him at some later time.”

“Do you think he’s recruitable?”

César replaced the demitasse cup on the silver tray and leaned back on the sofa to consider his answer. “I believe so. But particularly so if he and Muna marry. Muna already knows of my work for you, so that should pose no obstacle. And if they raise a family, they will need the added income that work for your government would bring. Which brings me to the reason why I have spoken to you at such great length about Muna’s American husband.

“The matter is this: two nights ago, she and I discussed for the first time Elie’s intentions to marry her. At the end of our discussion, Muna promised me that if you and Edouard can persuade her that William is dead, or even if you fail to find compelling evidence of his existence after a thorough search of your government’s records, then she will agree to seek an annulment of her marriage to William and accept Elie’s proposal. So I ask you, Charles, will you conduct such an investigation for me…and my family?”